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The Other Walls
The Arab-Israeli Peace Process in a Global Perspective
By Harold H. Saunders PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07888-5
CHAPTER 1
The Arab-Israeli Peace Process
Breaking Down the Barriers to Peace
On November 19, 1977, American television screens showed the Egyptian airliner as it drew to a stop on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. For the first time in modern history, an Arab leader on a mission of state under the eyes of a captivated world stepped onto Israeli soil. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat walked slowly along a line of waiting leaders of the Jewish state, shaking hands with each in turn. These were the modern stewards of four thousand years of Jewish history. They were men and women diverse in political orientation, personality, and views regarding the future of their state — but they were one in yearning for peace and acceptance. Sadat came offering peace and acceptance, that "sacred message ... of security, safety and peace to every man, woman and child in Israel."
Three weeks later, a colleague and I rode in a car with an Israeli friend of long standing, a highly respected diplomat. We were driving from the airport to Jerusalem. Over the years this friend had been resolutely skeptical that an Egyptian leader could sincerely want and negotiate peace with Israel. As we traveled back and forth between Egypt and Israel, we had repeatedly told him that Sadat was ready to make peace — that a new spirit characterized the leadership of Egypt. He remained doubtful. That day as our motorcade gathered speed heading from the airport toward the Judean hills and the City of Peace, he turned and said, with the seriousness and awe of personal discovery, "He really wants peace." Most of the men and women of Israel had shared in this discovery.
Progress toward an Arab-Israeli peace depends first on convincing human beings — individually and then collectively — that peace is possible. The political leader's ability to change the political environment is a prerequisite. Only after political change has occurred do the diplomat, the mediator, and the negotiator stand a chance. The obstacles to peace lie in human minds and hearts. They are psychological, human, and political. Peace will remain unattainable until we have a political strategy for breaking down the "other walls" that block our path.
When President Sadat spoke on November 20 in Jerusalem before the parliament of the Israeli people and to a watching world, he presented a negotiating position about which the Israelis did not want to hear — withdrawal to 1967 borders, a Palestinian state, an Arab role in east Jerusalem. At the same time he carried another, more basic message to the people of Israel and delivered it to them face to face at the seat of their government: Egypt accepts Israel and is ready to make peace with Israel. This second message the Israelis did hear — and wanted to hear. Sadat's visit became the act of a statesman changing the political environment and was not mainly the act of a negotiator.
Sadat set forth his own diagnosis of the obstacles to peace:
Yet, there remains another wall. This wall constitutes a psychological barrier between us, a barrier of suspicion, a barrier of rejection; a barrier of fear, of deception, a barrier of hallucination without any action, deed or decision.
A barrier of distorted and eroded interpretation of every event and statement. It is this psychological barrier which I described in official statements as constituting 70 percent of the whole problem.
Today, through my visit to you, I ask why don't we stretch out our hands with faith and sincerity so that together we might destroy this barrier?
In May 1985 King Hussein of Jordan in Washington spoke of the same barriers using other words:
The Lebanese tragedy has caused both Israelis and Palestinians to reassess the validity of their previous policies. Both are now considering, simultaneously, the need for a negotiated peace. Each is skeptical. The Palestinians need hope. The Israelis need trust. It is important for all of us to provide the hope and trust they need. If we fail to do so, hope will surely turn to deeper despair and trust to invincible suspicion. The dangers for all of us, including them, will be much worse than before.
Lyndon Johnson also made the point on June 19, 1967: "We are not here to judge whose fears are right or whose are wrong. Right or wrong, fear is the first obstacle to any peacemaking."
This book argues that progress toward an Arab-Israeli settlement depends not just on negotiating agreements but also — indeed first — on building the human and political environment necessary for sustained negotiation. Progress toward peace depends on breaking down the barriers to negotiation and reconciliation — the other walls. If we ignore the politics of breaking down these barriers, the mediator and negotiator may never have a chance.
I do not say that progress in the peace process requires us to sweep away all hatred and misunderstanding. To make such a statement would be like stepping in quicksand. Sadat himself noted on numerous occasions that peace in the sense of normal relations would have to wait "for the next generation." That did not stop Sadat from trying to change attitudes enough so that a carefully negotiated agreement could capture the change, and consolidate a new political environment as the framework for another step. The diplomats and negotiators too often go to the other extreme, trying to negotiate without attacking the barriers — without preparing the political foundations.
What Is the Peace Process?
The subject of my book is what in the 1970s we began to call the Arab-Israeli "peace process." With U.S. help, parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict concluded the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement of January 1974, the Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreement of May 1974, a second Egyptian-Israeli interim agreement in September 1975, the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979. The president and secretary of state were extensively involved; Secretary Kissinger shuttled back and forth, and President Carter hosted unprecedented negotiations at Camp David and concluded them in his March 1979 trip to Egypt and Israel.
More specifically, the subject of this book is the politics of the peace process — the part of the process that takes place outside the negotiating room in the political arena. The peace process is more than conventional diplomacy and negotiation. It encompasses a full range of political, psychological, economic, diplomatic, and military actions woven together into a comprehensive effort to establish peace between Israel and its neighbors.
The phrase "peace process" probably has no definition in the literature of political science or international relations. We coined it in 1974–1975 — using it perhaps imprecisely at first — because we needed a shorthand expression. Kissinger's shuttles and the mediated agreements held the headlines and public attention, but the negotiations were not all that was happening during those trips.
We did indeed mediate three Arab-Israeli agreements in 1974–1975, but even more important than the negotiations were the profound political reorientations that changed the political environment so that it would support those negotiations. President Sadat tried through peace to free resources to improve life in Egypt. He turned from Soviet arms and centrally planned economic development to U.S. diplomacy and an open door to Western economies. In February 1974, by promising to try to mediate an Israeli-Syrian disengagement, Kissinger elicited Saudi agreement to lift the oil embargo. Cooperative relationships between finance ministers in the key oil-producing states and Washington helped stabilize the impact on the global economy of rapidly accumulating oil revenues. Arab leaders began increasingly to accept Israel as a permanent presence and began to talk about peace. In those days, we probably hung too much on the commonplace statement that "the pursuit of an Arab-Israeli settlement is the centerpiece of American strategy in the Middle East."
As time passed, we started to use the phrase less broadly. We referred less to our own regional strategy and more pointedly mentioned the politics and diplomacy involved in bringing the parties in the conflict to the peace table and to agreement once they had begun negotiating. The more the political situation settled down after the 1973 War and the oil embargo, the more we concentrated on ways of bringing about the next step in negotiation. During his first year in office, President Carter focused on arranging for resumption of the Middle East Peace Conference in Geneva to negotiate a comprehensive peace. In his second year he focused on ways of translating Sadat's visit to Jerusalem into concrete agreements and practical progress toward peace. That year witnessed the unique negotiations at Camp David and the beginning of negotiations on the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The third year saw ratification of the peace treaty and the beginning of negotiations on autonomy for the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. We understandably came to see the peace process in terms of the negotiations and the agreements they produced.
The more sharply we examine the process as it occurred back in the 1970s, however, the more acutely we become aware of the political character of the tools used to move that process forward. From our perspective in the mid-1980s, we can again sense the frustration we felt during those long periods when it seemed impossible to get negotiations started. We remember that the 1973 War and President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem — both political acts — largely created the environment for negotiation. We also recall that even the breakthroughs in negotiation resulted from political acts, that is, from Carter's unprecedented invitations to Camp David in 1978 and from his sudden trip to Egypt and Israel in 1979. These events set the stage for the diplomatic formulations that, in a supportive political environment, could break negotiating stalemates.
Any negotiating process encompasses two large periods — one that precedes actual negotiation and one that starts when negotiators are gathered around the table. The theorists and the diplomats normally concentrate on identifying the formulas and techniques that are useful in the negotiating room. They have historically paid less attention to ways of persuading people to enter that room. I make this distinction to underscore the heavily political character of the job that must be done before negotiations can begin. Techniques that may prove effective when the parties are sitting at the table may not be adequate in the earlier period, when the main task is to create a positive political environment. It remains important to build political support even during negotiation, but we neglect the politics of getting to negotiation.
The first period is sometimes a long and complicated stage, when parties are deciding whether or not to commit themselves to a peaceful settlement — or at least they are deciding that they will seriously explore the possibility of negotiating and will try to define what a negotiation would look like. Some leaders may explore out of conviction. Others may do so because they feel under pressure. In either case, one purpose will be to determine whether negotiation might produce a politically defensible agreement. The first period is mainly a time when political foundations for negotiation are built.
The second period chiefly involves active negotiation. What goes on around the negotiating table has its own character and intricacy. Even at this point, sustaining serious negotiation and eventually winning support for its results may depend heavily on the political foundations laid earlier and on their reinforcement during the negotiation and afterward. The necessary foundations will be built outside the negotiating room.
By placing present diplomatic situations in such an analytical framework, we may be better able to identify the real obstacles to a negotiated peace and to concentrate our efforts on breaking them down. Revival of the peace process in the mid-1980s will require the United States to pay much more attention to laying the political foundations for negotiation than it has paid at any time in the past. The first years of the 1980s were a period of stagnation. After the Egyptian-Israeli treaty had been signed in March 1979, attention shifted to Israel's eastern frontiers with Jordan, to the Palestinians, and to Syria. On those frontiers the foundations for negotiation had not been laid. Large political obstacles remained. The tools for overcoming them are more likely to involve building confidence than drafting the right formulas and texts. The other walls that block the way to peace are often barriers in human perception and feeling that are all too infrequently addressed by the diplomatic options papers.
A Word about Politics and Diplomacy
I do not intend to distinguish between politics and diplomacy rigidly or artificially, but it is critical to reflect on differences in focus. The diplomacy practiced by a statesman can be a political art; politics are the object of the diplomat's analysis and reporting. Nevertheless, there is a sharp distinction in the world of government between the diplomats and those who wield political power. Apart from natural differences in background and abilities, anyone who has served, as I have, on the National Security Council staff, bridging the gap between presidents and career officials, has felt the deep-seated mutual suspicion. I mention the distinction here solely to draw attention to the politics of the peace process.
The words "politics" and "diplomacy" in their dictionary definitions carry different connotations. Politics normally prompts us to think of relationships within a political community that are ordered so as to provide organization, direction, protection, control, and regulation for individual members. Diplomacy is normally regarded as meaning the art of conducting relations and negotiations between nations to settle differences between them and to maintain a relationship based on common interests.
More important is the difference that stands out in stark terms for the diplomats, elected officials, and political appointees in governments. The distinction between the people who lead governments and those who staff them is keenly felt within those governments. In the United States, career Foreign Service officers are prohibited by law from participating in our national politics except to cast their own votes. (I recall a note in which President Nixon warned the National Security Council staff not to mention domestic politics in memos to him.) Career officers are frequently banned from meetings at the higher political levels. Such professionals are associated with an analytical community outside government in which academic specialists in international relations study regional cultures or try to refine concepts such as interests and models of negotiation. In short, career officers are encouraged to think analytically and not in terms of political maneuver and influence.
In the American system, political maneuver and influence wielding are most often left to the president and his advisers at the political levels of government. There politicians work in a world where success depends on the ability to control and rally other human beings. In this world human emotion controls as much as reason — emotion in the form of ambition and insecurity, hope and defensiveness against assaults on identity, inspiration and challenges from political opposition, addiction to power, and uncertainty.
The difference came home to me one morning as I sat at the large table in the conference room next to the Jerusalem office of the Israeli prime minister. My colleagues and I had spent most of the night working on papers for the next day's talks and negotiations. As we sat on one side of the table beside our president, facing the Israeli prime minister and his team on the other, I thought, "We spent most of the night writing what the president should persuade the prime minister to accept. Now the president actually has to persuade that man across the table to do what the president wants him to do. How different the jobs of the politician and the diplomat!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Other Walls by Harold H. Saunders. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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